The luxury car buff at the centre of the Yahoo hack

At first, classmates thought his parents were wealthy, but then Baratov bought a luxury car for this father, said one of his friends.Bloomberg | March 18, 2017, 08:11 IST

When Karim Baratov said on Facebook he’d paid off a mortgage and drove a BMW 7 series at high school, classmates thought he had rich parents. The money may have come, instead, from a secret life as a cyber hacker, including work for Russia’s top spy agency.

The US government indicted four people on Wednesday for allegedly hacking Yahoo accounts for the Russian government. Baratov, a Canadian born in Kazakhstan who is 22 years old now, is the only one likely to see trial.

He was arrested on Tuesday and appeared in court in Hamilton, Ontario. In the indictment, Baratov’s jet-black Mercedes Benz C54 and Aston Martin DBS (complete with “Mr Karim” vanity plate) are listed as assets that the US is seeking to seize, arguing they were obtained through illegal activity.

Baratov is charged with working for Dmitry Dokuchaev, a hacker for hire who was pressed into working with Russia’s FSB security service to avoid prosecution for bank-card fraud. The Canadian used fake emails to lure targets to give up sensitive information that allowed him to get passwords, which he then sold to Dokuchaev for $100 each, according to the US Department of Justice.

‘Great guy’

Friends and acquaintances of Baratov said he was a quiet, polite person who rarely spoke about his work. “Extremely nice, polite and smart kid,” said Dillon Kovljenic, who became friends with Baratov while doing work on some of his cars over the last two years. Baratov paid on time for work on his cars and Kovljenic never asked what this young customer did for a living, he added.

Pictures on his Facebook account show a two-story suburban home with Audis and a Porsche out front. At first, classmates thought his parents were wealthy, but then Baratov bought a luxury car for this father, said one of his friends. When he did talk about work, he would say he built websites for clients he found online, the friend said.

In a February 14 Facebook post, Baratov said he was expelled during his last year of high school, four years ago. That allowed him to focus on his “online projects” and increase the amount of money he was making. He’d already paid off his first mortgage and drove a BMW 7 Series in high school, he wrote in the post.

Baratov’s Instagram account shows him posing with friends at a club, flexing his tattooed biceps at the gym and cuddling a grey cat. He drew pencil drawings of cars, friends and a portrait of Arnold Schwarzenegger, which he also posted to Instagram and Facebook.

In the February 14 post, Baratov said his expulsion from school helped spur him onto success. “Get the most out of your life,” he wrote. “Taking shortcuts doesn’t mean shortcutting the end result.”